The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [11]
It was the most interesting thing Ranjit had found in the wasteland of Biology 101. Rogue nations? Weaponized disease? Those were things he wanted to talk about with Gamini, but that wasn’t possible. Gamini had one of those poli-sci classes just before lunch and thus would not be available for sharing for at least another hour.
Bored, Ranjit did what he had avoided doing for most of the term. There was an open-attendance seminar for do-gooders, something about the world’s water problems. All students were encouraged to attend, and, of course, most students resolutely stayed away. That made it a place where he could maybe drowse with nobody talking to him.
But the lecturer began talking about the Dead Sea.
Ranjit had given very little thought to the Dead Sea, but to the lecturer it was a hidden treasure. What you could do, he said, was dig aqueducts from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, four hundred meters below sea level, and use the height difference to generate electricity.
Ranjit found his mind racing at the idea. It was problem solving on a huge scale, and it was something worth doing! Ranjit couldn’t wait to tell Gamini about it.
But when Gamini finally showed up for lunch, he wasn’t impressed. “Old stuff,” Gamini informed him. “My father’s friend Dr. Al-Zasr—he’s an Egyptian; they went to school together in England—told us about it once at dinner. Only it’s never going to happen. It was an Israeli idea, and the other nations around there don’t like Israeli ideas.”
“Huh,” Ranjit said. The lecturer hadn’t mentioned that it was an Israeli idea. Or that it was twenty years old, and that if it hadn’t been built in twenty years, it wasn’t likely to be built now.
Gamini wasn’t all that interested in chikungunya, either, and then it was his turn to educate Ranjit. “Your problem,” he informed his friend, “is what they call the GSSM syndrome. Know what that is? No, you don’t, but it’s what you’re doing. It’s your multitasking, Ranj. You’re cutting yourself into too many pieces. My psych teacher says there’s a good chance it makes you stupid, because, you know, every time you switch from one thing to another, you’re interrupting yourself, and you can do that just so much before there’s a permanent effect on your prefrontal cortex and you’ve got ADD.”
Ranjit frowned. He was fiddling around on Gamini’s laptop. Recently, Ranjit had begun learning everything he could about computers. “What’s ADD? And while we’re at it, what’s the GSSM syndrome?”
Gamini gave him a reproving look. “You really should try to keep up, Ranj. ADD is attention deficit disorder, and GSSM is the initials of the four people who led the research into the multitasking syndrome. There was somebody named Grafman, plus people named Stone, Schwartz, and Meyer. There was a woman named Yuhong Jiang, too, but I guess they didn’t have room for any more initials. Anyway, it sounds to me like you’re too concerned with events beyond your control.”
It was a fair cop. Nevertheless, that night, before turning in, Ranjit made a point of watching the news, just to show that he wasn’t ruled by his friend’s notions. Not much of it was good. At least a score of countries were still truculently declaring that they had every right to whatever nuclear programs they chose to implement, and most of them were in fact implementing them. North Korea was, as usual, displaying itself as the very model of a rogue state. In endlessly troubled Iraq a Shiite incursion into oil-rich Kurdish territory threatened to set off another round of the turmoil that characterized that troubled country.
And so it went.
There was a personal item about to come up on the bad-news list at the next day’s lunch, too.
Ranjit was not immediately